B E B E R E

Modernism weakening its grip?

For some time, I've felt that we've been in need of a second Vienna Secession. When you cease to even attempt to communicate with the public, when you only concentrate on "speaking to other artists" (as Hal put it once), you end up with a lot of sound and little meaning. Will we see a movement back to less 'academic' works? Works that, as one letter writer put it, may give "a thought to the need human beings feel to have a song in their aching hearts?"

-via Colby Cosh, who ran with the fact that Strauss's Four Last Songs were darn appropriately named. (Kind of weird to run into this today, since Karen and I were actually talking about Strauss and these songs yesterday.)